Opera to use WebKit for its browsers and contribute to Chromium

It's official! The most innovative browser meets the best browser engine!

Opera is going to kill it's own Presto engine and use WebKit for all of its browsers. They are also contributing to Chromium, Opera teams revealed in a press release.

"The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need," says CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie. "It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout."

Great news! Opera will use WebKit for rendering pages and V8 as JavaScript engine. Chrome and Opera will work similarly, only the interface will be changed. Apple’s Safari also uses WebKit, though it has its own JavaScript engine.